Anti-Subjugator

Fuck austerity - put it on Mastercard!

2009-09-27

Strategy before resources

I can't believe how often I have had cause to quote Obama. The main thing he did that I applaud him for is to not throw Iraq, allowing the Iraqis to come up to speed. The Iraqis certainly aren't at US standards - but then neither are the enemy they face. The Iraqis have declined to call on the US to come back into the cities, presumably to prove their own competence. And indeed, there's not the slightest threat of the Iraqi government being toppled by insurgents.

"What I'm not also gonna do, though, is put the resource question before the strategy question. Until I'm satisfied that we've got the right strategy I'm not gonna be sending some young man or woman over there- beyond what we already have."

That's another one of these implicit assumptions I have had, but never articulated.

Growing up as a kid, indeed, throughout my life, the charities were mainly focussed on throwing money at Africa. Calls for donations were focussed on how we should help the poor starving masses. Who, believe it or not, were perpetually starving, which was of course physically impossible.

So - you have to step back and ask what you're doing here. There's a very limited amount of money available for charity. It needs to be spent wisely. As Obama said - it's important to have the strategy right first.

What's the right strategy for Africa? Obviously having dictators squandering the country's wealth can't be helpful. And implementing communist regimes there isn't going to be helpful either. Obstensibly installing democracy there should solve that problem, as no-one would be so stupid to vote for communism, right? Ok, so I've since modified my strategy a bit, to avoid communism making matters worse. But even before the modification, just the first goal of replacing dictatorships with democracy - unlikely to make anything worse - needed a strategy. BEFORE we started throwing scarce resources to make it happen.

Unfortunately when I was a kid, there was a constant threat of a communist invasion of Europe. In hindsight, with no chance of being proven wrong, it's easy to be an expert and say "it would never happen" or "they would have failed". The first is what Kuwait said prior to being invaded by Iraq. The second is what the French thought about the Maginot line, and what the British thought about German submarines.

If we had started invading African countries to bring them democracy, there was a reasonable chance that that would have triggered off a Hot War with the communists, with Europe being overrun. We needed to instead talk about the inviolability of sovereign states, and concentrate on protecting Europe. Basically defeating the communist ideology was a precursor to fixing the rest of the world.

Also note the importance of resources. It is resources that are used to solve problems and win wars. You need to see what forces have deployed resources against your own strategy, and concentrate on eliminating them first. There is not necessarily one perfect strategy. You may take on the biggest enemy head on, or you may take on some smaller enemies first, to eliminate them from the equation. Note that this applies equally if, as an individual, you are mugged by 3 guys of differing size. There may be multiple winning paths and multiple losing paths and you probably can't guarantee in advance what the various outcomes will be. Of course, you can't guarantee what will happen if you do nothing either. Maybe the thugs will have a change of heart at the last minute, or maybe they will kill you as part of an initiation ceremony. The "do nothing" option isn't very enticing though.

Regardless, that is what all these charities were missing - strategy. They were very good at spending money (who isn't), but not so great at actually making that money produce some long-term effect, such as converting those countries into *exporters* of aid.

So, like Obama, my first port of call in life was to simply elaborate a strategy (basically - convert dictatorships into democracies), and then only fund things that seemed to be achieving that effect. That roughly means - the US et al militaries. But they were already properly funded. I never saw an NGO that was collecting money for the fight against communism (even on Australian campuses). Although I probably wouldn't donate to that anyway, as I don't think it would have had any effect. It wasn't until the Romanian revolution that there was something sensible to donate to. And then another pause until the Iraqi bloggers came online. The Iraqi bloggers weren't for the fight against communism obviously. That was the fight against dictatorship, and against human rights abuses.

So, when we have these debates, in future I will try to ask in advance:

1. What is your goal for the world?2. What is your strategy for achieving that goal?

And I'll probably simply tear apart the other person's answers to those before promoting my own. One of the big problems is that the other person usually lives in a fantasy world, and will talk in terms of capitalists exploiting the 3rd world slaves every time someone buys a banana (or pair of shoes for that matter) from them. That's why part of my own strategy is to defeat DOGMA, because that is the biggest barrier to progress.

2009-09-05

Saddam the Humanist

Before Saddam ended up swinging from a rope, the FBI had an opportunity to interview him.

I recall the words of Dale Carnegie in "How to Win Friends and Influence People". That even terrible criminals do not consider themselves to be bad. Don't admit they were bad and selfish and instead come up with a lot of spin to make themselves look good. This was quite a revelation to me at the time. I assumed it was just a matter of getting to the root definitions and then having people admit that they were wrong. I thought the USSR would do that too. Dogma was a big thing getting in the way there. They had a dogmatic belief that by trading with others, capitalists were "exploiting" others. Marx said so!

I would have liked more information on how he could seriously believe what Baghdad Bob was telling him, and whether such gross misunderstandings could suggest that he had other gross misunderstandings. But I guess we can do that with basically any Democrat who is convinced that Republicans eat babies and sit around plotting their next dastardly attack on blacks.

Anyway, here are some choice quotes.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/02.pdf

"He added that, as a humanitarian, he hoped the same for the American people".

By the way, as an aside, let me say that he mentions God a lot, and the Quran, but the uselessness of books like this lies in the fact that he says he fears God, yet there's nothing in the Quran that says that if he runs a cruel dictatorship and doesn't allow dissent, God will send him to Hell.

Similar to the semi-uselessness of the bible that arranged for Christians to not work on the Sabbath, while simultaneously allowing slavery.

I mean, what sort of priorities are these?

Continuing.

Honestly, prior to the war, I believed that Saddam had WMD. Just as I currently believe that Libya doesn't. In the first case I know I was wrong. In the second, who knows. Only Gaddafi knows that for sure. Maybe he has a second secret program. I can only go by my best guess that Gaddafi has truly disarmed, and thus there are far higher priorities than Libya. But at the time, there was no higher priority than Iraq.

From my logical point of view, if you want to avoid war with the West, you have to convince them that you are no threat. Saddam was instead acting very cagily, for reasons that were only truly known to him. Until now, anyway. You can see his answer to this question:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/23.pdf

"Hussein was reminded of a speech he gave in June, 2000, where he stated that he would not disarm until the region was disarmed".

He explains that he didn't want Iran to know that Iraq was weak. Honestly, what a moron. He's projecting on to Iran. As much of nutcases as the Iranian dictatorship is, I don't see any attempt to launch military attacks on others. Saddam assumes that because he wants to expand his dictatorship, everyone else is the same.

In the same article, he says it was completed by 1998.

And here:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/05.pdf

"Hussein further acknowledged Iraq made a mistake by destroying some weapons without UN supervision".

we can see the doofus is at least smart enough to realise he brought this on himself.

Note that I personally would have given priority to Iraq even if I knew for sure he didn't have WMD. Simply because Iraq is the country full of Arabs where liberal democracy is most likely to succeed. It was imperative to know why Arab Muslims were the only group of people in the world where there was no sign of liberal democracy taking hold, and instead, it was generating terrorists. What was causing this strange ideological position where people would give their lives to kill some Americans instead of giving their lives for the freedom of their own countries?

The Iraqis were the best ones to answer that question.

Once we had the answer (which we now do - message 666), we can more-or-less waltz into places like Saudi Arabia and say "You have 2 months to start looking like Iraq. If we don't see a shitload of progress by then, we're going to start shooting rulers". Without Iraq as an example, our only options to respond to the horrible ideology that caused 9/11 were:

These are all crap solutions. First of all we didn't know what percentage of people actually supported Osama. We don't have a secret ballot to find out. Secondly, we don't give an opportunity for the percentage of good people to save their lives. Thirdly, we don't know what is causing this strange ideology in the first place. If we lose this opportunity, we may squash our chances at finding out what causes Timothy McVeigh to act too. You can't kill every white male American like McVeigh on the offchance that he might attack America. There has to be a better way. Or at least, let's make a reasonable attempt to find one.

Incidentally, when I started posting on the Iraqi blogs, I started off by advocating option 4 above. Obviously I didn't really want to do that, but I wanted to pose the question, because at that time I was unable to put my finger on who the enemy was, and wanted someone to reply with "there's no need to kill ALL Muslims, including Muslims in America. The enemy is only xyz". Without Iraq, I couldn't get an answer to xyz, and it was extremely important to know the answer to that, because I couldn't promote my own ideology (a vague "freedom fighter" was apparently insufficient, given that that's what Arafat called himself) when I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT WAS. I was hoping these people could tell me.

There was a vague "Christian vs Muslim" mentioned, but it failed to take into account the atheists (including myself) who were also championing the "Christian" side of the war. And of course then we were faced with the bloggers themselves, some of whom were Muslims. After a lot of discussion, I was finally able to say "the war is between non-humanists and anti-non-humanists". Message 666 was to come later after I had broken down the major examples of non-humanism that inspired me to fight (or perhaps, strongly support the fight, the same way I strongly supported law and order in Australia). E.g. I'm very used to people attacking whites. But it's insufficient to say that I'm an anti-anti-white. Because I also object to the Japanese massacring Chinese. Even the Nazis couldn't stomach that cruelty. The answer was simple, and obvious, in hindsight. It's simply "anti-racist", using the true meaning of the word, instead of the left-wing meaning of the word which is "anti-white".

Note that sometimes the whites are the aggressors as well as the victims. E.g. reports of Dutch people spitting on innocent Germans who never did a damn thing to Holland. Pretty likely the spitter was a Christian too. We can't have a nice, peaceful world if there are going to be attacks on innocent people like that occur.

Note that someone else was able to generalize even message 666 for me. These different things that people were attacking based on were all examples of AGGREGATION. And that the secret then is to eliminate all these forms of aggregation. It's a bit like saying that all blonde women are dumb. I'm not arguing for a banning of blonde jokes any more than trying to stop NZers from saying Australian jokes. It's all in good humour (and I'll leave you with one of the best I've heard at the end). I'm just saying it is an example of aggregation and that the solution to this is to treat people as individuals. But it's insufficient to just say "treat everyone as individuals". Men seem to have an inherent desire to prove their bravery. Fine. Let's work with that. Teach men to fight aggregators! It's a noble cause and you will be judged by how many aggregators you manage to defeat. Of course, the surreptitious side-effect of this is to just prevent him from being an aggregator himself. He internalizes his opposition to aggregation, ensuring that everyone gets treated as an individual.

There's the solution. The solution has been available for 5 years now. And at this rate, the solution will continue to only be adopted in a haphazard accidental manner by people who find themselves heading in that direction for reasons unknown to them. Oh well. Maybe I should put some more useful keywords in my writing to reach a wider more typical worldwide audience? Worth a shot.

2009-09-03

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

This article from Dave Kilcullen recently came to my attention. He has an articulate position on his opposition to the Iraq war, and I love to look at those things to trace them back to the basic assumptions that were made in the chain of logic that must differ greatly from mine to come to some a strange (to me) viewpoint.

Here is where I found it:

"When we invaded Iraq, we took on a moral and legal responsibility for its people’s wellbeing. Regardless of anyone’s position on the decision to invade, those obligations still stand and cannot be wished away merely because they have proven inconvenient)."

We supposedly have some obligations.

When Saddam was filling mass graves, we apparently didn't have any obligations to stop it. When women were being raped, still no obligation. But when we invade a country, ostensibly on a weapons hunt, we incur all sorts of responsibilities? Why isn't it the Iraqi people who have a responsibility to pay for the entire cost of the weapons hunt?

Something that really irks me is people insisting that if the Iraqi people didn't wan to end up in mass graves, it is them who have to rise up against, we don't need to, and indeed, shouldn't, be involved. When I point out to them that that is a technical impossibility against a modern military, they insist that it can be done, and then cite examples that usually involve a glorified military coup. When I then point out to them that just for their amusement, the Iraqis did do exactly as they asked, in 1991, and 100,000 of them died, without achieving a damn thing, they normally just get angry. It'd be nice to occasionally hear someone say "hmmm, you got me there", but I've lived with humans for too long to expect that to ever happen.

Regardless, there is no shortage of people who insist that the Iraqis are the only ones who have a right or responsibility to obtain their freedom, regardless of whether that is technically possible or not. So there are no circumstances, not even institutionalized rape, that will goad them into action, or even give permission for others to go into action. They instead insist that it's the fault of the "gutless" males in that country for not acting. A truly cruel position to take. Adding insult to injury, and at the same time not even protecting women. What sort of man does that?

My opinion differs from that, but it also differs from Dave's where he thinks we have taken on a responsibility for general population protection.

No, no, no. The primary responsibility for general population protection is on the Iraqi males themselves. It always was. It always will be. Our obligation should be restricted to ensuring that it is technically possible for them to provide that protection. With Saddam's weaponry, that wasn't in reach. After the invasion, it was. And FAR from being "gutless", we saw long lines of Iraqis trying to join the security forces to ensure that they could do that. It truly was a beautiful sight.

However, there was an even bigger, unmentioned, obligation. We have an obligation to protect ourselves - the existing free world. Iraq was merely a potential member of that club, and quite frankly, if things hadn't worked out, and played out differently, they might have simply been a glass desert instead.

In order to protect ourselves, it was necessary to find out what was causing the Arab Muslims to be hostile towards us instead of towards a butcher like Saddam, at least if media and election results were to be believed. And simply sending in heaps of troops to impose a new political order on the Iraqi people would not have answered that question. We needed what Mao instituted, with some of the same nefariousness that he mustered. We needed the Iraqi people to honestly say what they thought so that we knew whether to nuke the entire place or get a handle on whether we could turn it around, or how much effort would be involved. And the only way of extracting that information was to make them believe that they weren't being controlled by anyone and that they were free to do whatever they wanted. And how did we get them to believe that? Simple. We made it true. Insufficient troops were sent in to ram something down their throats. Just enough were sent in to ensure that there would be no ramming. Only majority opinion would prevail.

So we got the information we needed in order to protect ourselves from future terrorist attacks. The blueprint - message 666. That information wasn't available in Afghanistan. It was locked up in the minds of Arab Muslims and we needed to hear a lot of them speak freely.

But that's something specific to Iraq. Iraq enabled us to fulfill our obligations to ourselves.

The other countries, and indeed, Iraq also gets the same rights in this, have a right to expect us to at least take the monkey off their back - the monkey being their armed forces - when we can do that relatively easily. After that, it's over to them. No reconstruction money. Nothing. The Iranians, North Koreans, Burmese can pay for their own rebuilding. To give those countries rebuilding money, when other countries still have monkeys on their back would be extremely discriminatory policy.

Monkeys first. Any foreign aid for reconstruction is a distant second. And the foreign aid is not an obligation. It should be given freely. The way things are currently set up in the west - social respect being given for charitable donations, not wealth, - is the way to do that. Rather than trying to force it on people like communism tries, which takes away any soul-satisfying attempt at making the world a better place.

Unless the foreign aid is part of an effort to fulfill our government's responsibility to protect its own citizens, anyway. Then that gets priority over other monkeys in the world.

And with those orders of priority, an obligation pecking-sequence if you will, the way the Afghan and Iraqi wars have been done politically is an absolute work of art. At this point it doesn't really require any further political manoeuvring. People like Dave are the right people to be in charge. We have democratically-elected governments in both countries we can go to for approval for anything (meaning they take responsibility), and we just allow our professionals (like Dave) to do what they're best at. Making sure we can blame subsequent cockups on the locals is another important political thing that was done. We only give advice, and make sure the locals are the ones that take the rap, when our professionals basically just carry out their orders. (In effect, they give orders, even though obviously no-one is so stupid to give them legal authority over our forces - but defacto control is fine, and desired, so that we can use the "only following orders sir" excuse no matter what happens).

I don't follow world events much more these days. Even if Pakistan were to be invaded tomorrow, the only thing I'm interested in is whether there's any problem with nukes. I already know that it's a nation full of religious bigots.

Iran has something of great interest to me - I want to know if a country can be liberated with far fewer troops than were used in Iraq, by just allowing the military to change sides, or be annihilated from the air. I'm also interested in hearing what they have to say about Islamic Paradises.

North Korea, Burma etc - all need to be freed - we have an obligation to do so - but until we get permission to do so, there's nothing to see, nothing to do, and post-liberation, there is nothing to actually learn from it. May as well be rerunning the liberation of Haiti. Of course I'll be happy, indeed, ecstatic, to welcome new members of the free world, and watching them line up to vote. Truly wonderful. But no further analysis is required. Historians will be able to produce a documentary on all the atrocities in North Korea etc. But my input is not required for that. And it'll just be a rerun of Iraq, Iran etc etc. They may as well be showing the same car crash on the Hume Highway that I swear they've been showing for the last 2 decades.

My talents are best utilized in other arenas at this point in time, as indeed they were before 9/11 and the Iraq War provided an opportunity to finally solve the important problem of conflict in the world.

And that's the ultimate answer to the ultimate question, on this very day.